phantasmagoria, in five parts
by Libbyish
Summary: Latent memories are the most powerful. They lie in wait, biding their time, until they are stumbled upon once more. Then they sink their claws into you and hollow you out. A drabble for Kanae. Please R&R.


**jealousy**  
She kept her feelings bottled up inside, brewing anger in a slow furnace until the bottle broke, crystal shards tearing her up inside. She couldn't contain her hatred; she wanted to wrap her fingers around that delicate cocoa throat and just clamp down, to feel the crunch of the trachea beneath her crushing hands, to squeeze the life out of that unnatural girl who disturbed her dreams and reclaimed them as nightmares.

Seeking counsel in a building that smelled of smoke and ash, she received her fool's salvation. The rose that pierced her breast was the channel through which she could release all that had been killing her from the inside out, release it and redirect it at the one who was to blame.

She fingered the rose gently that day, treasuring it like a disturbed mother clasps her stillborn child to her bosom. Eventually, the petals of her miracle--her escape--were scattered, like all the roses of those who fancy themselves fighters, but rely on the strength of another. She tore at her eyes, and as the ring that engaged her to that fallen flower crumbled, she could _see_ it, for a brief shining second; the workings of this place were clear to her. She saw the union between her love and his sister for what it was, some sort of sick clockwork of flesh, keeping this place alive. She saw what _all_ of it was for. Then she fell, and the sight tumbled, forgotten, to join all the other destroyed dreams and cast-aside realizations that make up the foundation of an entire world.

**limitation, **or **self**  
She is, and she isn't.

Latent memories are the most powerful. They lie in wait, biding their time, until they are stumbled upon once more. Then they sink their claws into you and hollow you out.

It would have been better if she hadn't recalled it. When it came back to her, there was no rose to shield her heart from the force of it, no ring to bring it under her power. She was pure, and innocent, and helpless; she had no hope of comprehending it. It hit her like the flat of an axe to her face, shattering her frail ego into pieces, destroying whoever she had been up until that point. She was peeled away like petals from a rose, stripped down to the very core, and then set alight in a flash.

She became like a broken mirror inside. Pieces remained, and she retained some semblance of self. But most of the glass was gone, and when she gazed into that mirror, there wasn't enough to reflect a complete picture. Just glimpses of a lost self, incomplete. Just snatches of emotion and bits of memory rattling around in an empty container.

They all forgot about her. When the others went out into the world, she was left behind. Exactly how _much_ of her remained to be left behind in the first place is uncertain.

**attatchment**  
Ordinary people, like the former students of the academy, live for a short while and then die. They depart from life, gone to feed the roses. They are the fertilizer, the water, the sunlight; they are all of the temporary things that the roses are planted upon, the things that come and go, and which must be eventually replaced.

Exceptional people, like princes and princesses and witches, are never born and will never die. They exist on and on, reaching out from before the beginning to grasp that which comes after the end. They knowledgeably select the sacrifices from the masses, holding the proverbial blade to the chosen ones' throats and letting their fleeting life and ego trickle into the soil. They are the gardeners.

She, an innocent mortal girl tainted by tragic immortality, can do none of these things. She does not live anymore, and will not die; but because she was born, the cloth of her life laid out by the Moirae in a finite pattern, she is not immortal either. A mistake without a place, an electron orbiting existence. She broke from the atom, becoming a particle that has not yet been given a name.

A spider's thread binds her to all that is and isn't; the roses sucked her dry, taking everything she once had into them, and spit out a husk. She is neither normal nor fantastic. She is merely a leftover of both worlds.

**adoration**  
Occasionally in her aimless wanderings, she will make her way up to the former chairman's room. Treading over the thorns that lace the cold floor, her bare feet torn apart, she reaches the couch and curls up against her fiancee, whimpering. Grabbing the vicious tendrils in her hands, she tries to force them to twine about her the way they have him. She wants to bind herself to him with the creeping barbed strands, to pull the cruel things so tighly around their pressing bodies that they bleed, and the crimson trickles mingle together in some sort of morbid unity. Like drops of rain running to meet each other on the windshield of a speeding car.

The roses won't take her, the horrible, beautiful things that they are, and she is left to suffer alone. Her broken prince, though cocooned in living death, remains dark and pristine and shining. Her kaolin skin is caked in grime and dried petals, her hair is tangled and matted, her body is crisscrossed with shallow war-wounds inflicted by the battalion of thorns. The dark and wonderful flowers turn from her in disgust; this is no princess, this dirty, ragged _thing_. She is not fit for _their_ prince, and they will not give him to her. Not _ever._

**alienation**  
Once in a while, a handful of reckless youths will sneak onto the abandoned campus, in an attempt to prove their bravery to their dare-dealing friends. As with most children who break into haunted houses, they run out flush-faced and shiny-eyed, yelling that they have seen a ghost. Their parents tell them that there are no such things as ghosts, and that breaking into such places is dangerous. The young friends all agree in whispers that it is real, that they all saw it, that they didn't just imagine it. They make a pact on common, crumpled notebook paper, everyone signing their names and pricking their fingertips with a sewing needle so a drop of blood will fall. They bury it in the leader's backyard, vowing to never tell anyone else. This is their secret now.

They know that what they saw is real, because they saw it with their own eyes. The other children couldn't be lying either. All of their descriptions of the spectre are the same: She has unearthly pale skin and hair, both covered with dirt and crushed leaves like a wild thing. She is nude and bears soil-encrusted lacerations, red and angry with infection. Her eyes are cold and dead and alien.


End file.
